Review: Joseph Joseph Garlic Press

I love cooking with garlic.  And I hate cooking with garlic.  It’s delicious and one of the best cooking smells I know of, right up there with bacon, onions, and bacon and onions together.  But I absolutely loathe mincing it.  And using my garlic press is even worse than mincing it myself.  It loses pieces of unpressed garlic out of  the sides, and is a bear to clean properly so all the little bits of garlic get out.

Enter the Joseph Joseph Garlic Press.

I took a gamble on this with my last $15 of Christmas money.  And it was worth every. single. penny.  While you have to apply considerable downward force to use this press – much more than the instruction picture implies is necessary – it’s still easy to use.  It really gives fresh garlic the convenience of the preminced stuff in the jar.

It does take a lot of force to press the garlic.  Rocking it from side to side seems to help.  And while my garlic cloves fractured under that pressure and large pieces remained unminced, it was easy enough to get them with a second pass.  Two cloves took less than a minute, and that includes peeling them.

A little bit of garlic does remain stuck in the holes.  Whacking it on the cutting board dislodges most of this, but some seems to remain stuck.  There doesn’t seem to be more lost than when using a traditional garlic press.

But the best part is actually washing it.  Yes, I know!  I hate doing dishes, but doing the dishes is the best part of this tool.  One, it cleans up super easy.  Two, while you wash it, it removes the smell from your hands!  Three, it’s also dishwasher safe.  I don’t know that I would ever bother with the dishwasher, since you have wash it to get all the garlic out of the holes beforehand, but still.

This is the best kitchen tool I’ve bought in a long time, and we use garlic almost every day so it will see a ton of use.

I have no affiliation with either Sur La Table or Joseph Joseph.  I just love kitchen gadgets, and especially love finding one that’s truely useful.

Split Pea Soup

Soups are good this time of year, even when the weather here isn’t exactly cooperating. Split pea soup may look disgusting (and it does), but the flavor is unbeatable. With a fresh loaf of bread, it’s one of my favorite comfort foods when I’m under the weather, even more than chicken soup. It freezes and reheats well.  

 1 lb. dry split peas 

12 cups water 

1/2 lb. ham, diced 

3 carrots, diced 

3 stalks celery, diced 

2 small yellow onions, diced 

1 bay leaf 

1 tsp ground back pepper 

salt to taste 

 

 Fill a large pot with the water, throw in the dried split peas, and cook on medium to medium-low until the peas turn to mush. With frequent stirring and higher heat, they can be ready in about an hour, but it’s better to let them go on a lower heat for several hours. If the water runs low, add hot water to keep the peas from hardening. 

When the peas are mush, throw in the diced ham and vegetables, the bay leaf and the ground black pepper. Keep the soup at a simmer for another 30 minutes, or until the carrots are soft. Salt the soup to taste and serve.

Pumpkin Bread

For Enbrethiliel

This is the recipe my mom used when I was small, only I’ve Increased the amount of spices. I don’t know where it’s from, originally. It makes a sweet, dense, cake-like loaf, and is excellent as muffins for hasty breakfasts. Keep it in the fridge after it has cooled. The top of the loaf will get a little sticky, but this is part of its charm, especially for little ones. Baked in paper loaf pans, it makes a fantastic gift.

2 1/2 cups white sugar
2/3 cup shortening (164 g Crisco)
1 15oz. can pumpkin purée (1 3/4 cups)
4 large eggs
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2/3 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Cream the shortening and sugar until fluffy. Mix in the pumpkin and eggs. Combine all the dry ingredients, and add in batches alternating with the water. Pour into greased and floured pans, and bake.

24 normal muffins (muffin cups will be full!): Bake ~15-20 minutes.
2 loaf pans (8 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ or larger): Bake 70 minutes.
6-8 mini loaf pans: Bake ~25-30 minutes.

This is a sticky bread. A toothpick will come out covered in slightly sticky crumbs even when the loaf is done, check your toothpick for signs of the batter to check for doneness. Overbaking dries this bread out terribly, so start checking it early.

Birthday Cake Redux

This year’s birthday party theme was Star Wars. And I was at a lost for weeks and weeks as to how to decorate that cake. I’ve learned the hard way that while one can vividly, or even darkly tint buttercream, one shouldn’t. So not only did I need a recognizably ‘Star Wars’ cake, but I had to do it on a light background!

Here’s what I came up with:

This idea came to me in a stroke of brilliance on my bus ride home Friday night, the day before the party. I didn’t execute perfectly, since I wrote Part III instead of Episode III, but it still worked well enough. All the kids are three and four, they probably can’t read yet anyway. I used the smooth side of my #48 basket weave tip to write Happy Birthday, and #4 round for everything else.

That’s a 12″ square, half chocolate, half white cake with buttercream icing. My mother-in-law the retired Home Ec. teacher and baker extraordinaire told me long ago that if you wanted bigger cake pans, you can find them at craft stores, and she told me how many cake mixes they take.

Yeah, I use cake mixes. They make perfectly acceptable, ordinary cakes. And they’re eminently suitable for birthday parties, when you have a jillion other things to do anyway. Frosting that puppy will be trauma enough.

Buttercream

1 cup butter
1 cup shortening
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 pounds of confectioners sugar, sifted
3-6 tablespoons milk

Beat the butter and shortening together till they’re mixed, then mix in the vanilla. add the sugar a cup at a time, beating each addition well and scrape the bowl between so that all the sugar gets evenly incorporated. Then start adding milk, a tablespoon at a time while the mixer runs on slow. Don’t add too much, or your frosting wont dry properly. Mix on slow until smooth, and be careful of over mixing, this adds air bubbles

This is just enough frosting for a twelve inch cake. Divide your frosting in half, and set one half aside. Now divide the other half in half again. Set one of these aside. The big portion is for covering the exterior of your cake. One of the small portions is for filling the cake, and the last is for decorating.

I didn’t torte the cake this year, but I plan on doing it in future years. Two mixes just bake up too tall in a twelve inch pan and the center pieces never have enough enough frosting. Plus I always have frosting left over! Torting the cake will solve both problems at once.

Cost Effective Lemonade

I plan on serving lemonade at a birthday party next weekend, so I ran some quick calculations on my lemonade recipe. Giving 8 lemons per cup of juice, and 1 cup of sugar to produce a gallon of lemonade, the lemonade is only 2.25 a gallon.

Although this figure will obviously fluctuate based on the cost of lemons (four for a dollar at the moment) it was so cheap it astonished me. Simply Lemonade costs roughly that for half as much, and it isn’t nearly as good. Chick Fil A is as good, but tremendously expensive. And it takes almost no work to put a batch together.

Yes, I consider juicing 8 lemons and making simple syrup almost no work. I have one of these puppies, and the whole process takes all of fifteen minutes.

Beverages is one area where the cost savings of making from scratch really shine.

Lemonade!

Mmm, I love fresh lemonade. Especially when it’s hot out. That means here in Texas we need fresh lemonade 9-11 months of the year. To celebrate the 4th f July, here’s my foolproof lemonade recipe. I wash and save my gallon milk jugs and make it straight in them, especially for parties where I need gallons of the stuff.

Homemade Lemonade

• 2 cups fresh lemon juice
• 2 cups simple syrup (recipe below)
• 3 quarts water
• 2 lemons, washed and sliced with the seeds picked out (optional)

Combine all ingredients in a gallon jug. Cap and shake well to mix. Pour it into your serving vessels, and add the lemon slices to garnish it if you wish. It’s quite strong, made to be served over ice, so it doesn’t require chilling.

Simple Syrup

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup water

Put the sugar and water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Simmer it until all the sugar is dissolved, then remove from heat and let cool. It can be used cup for cup instead of sugar, and will keep for about a month in the fridge, tightly capped. This stuff is best for sweetening cold drinks, the sugar will stay dissolved in the drink and not just collect at the bottom of the pitcher or glass.

Saint Nicholas Cookie Cutters!

Today is the feast of Saint Nicholas, today known as Santa Claus.

This is the same Saint Nicholas who boxed the ears of Arius at the Council of Nicaea. Which is way cooler than the modern “lump of coal” nonsense and more in line with the old fashioned idea of him leaving switches in stockings for the naughty boys and girls.

Lesson: do not try Santa Claus’s temper.

Anyway, my semisweet toddler is still a little too young to grasp the “sweets in his shoes” (plus I forgot until about 9pm last night). But such things will keep until next year. But I did want to do something for Santa’s feast day, so I pulled out my copy of A Continual Feast and flipped to Advent.

And there was nothing. A recipe for Bishop’s Punch (ha ha) that is basically mulled red wine – can’t feed that to the toddling one. And then sweets sweets sweets.

But while reading through all those cookie recipes, I had a realization from reading the description of Springerles molds. I realized I needed a Saint Nicholas cookie cutter. Something with a miter and a crozier and full of awesome. I briefly toyed with the idea of making my own, but decided to check the internet first. One google search later led me here.

Check out those wonderful cookie cutters. They’re copper, and quite a decent price for copper too. I love the Austrian I design the best, although the Small Nick cutter has its charms.

I wonder if I can get one of these cutters in time for my general Christmas baking. If I can, we’ll have some gingerbread bishops!

Meanwhile and via email, the Mad Mo opines that gingerbread John the Baptist’s are far more appropriate. Hard to argue her point, really.

Cookie Cutters

I was going to blog a couple of recipes today with pictures.

Alas, my camera battery is dead and the charger is no where to be found. Such a pity. I was going to photograph those luscious chewy chocolate-espresso cookies for you. But I can’t. So I’m going to talk about cookie cutters instead.

Yes, cookie cutters. For Christmas cookies. I know there are cookie press devotees out there. Bah, I say to them. Christmas cookies ought to be a bit of work. The idea of quick and easy preparation for such a great celebration is rather contradictory, to my mind.

So I sorted through my cookie cutters this morning and picked out my favorite Christmas-y cutters to use. I have a star, a tree, an angel, a gingerbread man, a snowflake, and a bird. I wish I had a few more, like a bell or a sprig of holly or an ornament. But what I wish more was that there were more nice, regular sized copper cutters available.

I’ve got three very nice copper cutters, they cut nice, modest, 2-3 inch cookies, and they don’t get rust spots like my tin plated cutters. Why aren’t there more like them? But all the other copper cutters I see are these enormous contraptions that cut huge and intricate 6 inch cookies. And it makes me sad.

Anyhow, cut-out Christmas cookie recipes are coming soon… as soon as I can find my blasted camera battery charger!

Turkey Brining Tests Are Inconclusive

So I brined my first ever turkey this weekend. It was a nice big twenty pounder. We have half a breast and all the dark meat sitting in our freezer, plus the bones for making turkey stock.

My psychotic turkey roaster roasted that sucker in less than 3 hours.

I wanted to cry. I’d planned all dinner around the idea that a freaking twenty pound turkey would take at least 4 hours too cook and the turkey suddenly was done an hour before I was ready for it.

I hadn’t even started the bread. I hadn’t made the green bean casserole. I hadn’t so much as peeled a potato, or cleaned the asparagus, or reduced my turkey stock, or done a million other little things necessary to put dinner on the table hot and together.

This turkey got over cooked. The little poppy thermometer even popped. At that point, the breast is 15 degrees overcooked. I resigned myself to a simply arid turkey breast.

Miraculously, it wasn’t that dry. I don’t know if it was the turkey roaster or the brining or what. But this is definitely not the situation to judge whether brining makes a difference to the bird.

I’m just going to have to do the whole thing again.

Grandma’s Apple Pie

Okay, after bashing Pioneer Woman’s apple pie so badly, I feel like I ought to put my money where my mouth is.  So here’s my apple pie recipe.  It’s my favorite apple pie recipe, and I love apple pie.  I love apple pie so much that I make at least two at Christmas, because one just isn’t good enough.  I love apple pie so much that, even though I’m allergic to raw apples, I  willingly risk my eyes swelling shut by peeling and slicing endless amounts of apples for pie.

Yes, I’m allergic to apples.  If I get raw apple juice in my eyes, they tear up and swell essentially closed.  It’s miserable.

This pie is worth the risk.

1 unbaked double crust
6-8 granny smith apples, sliced thin
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons flour
1-2 tablespoons slightly softened butter, thinly sliced
cinnamon sugar

Preheat your oven to 450 F.

Line your pie pan with the bottom crust.  Fill it with sliced apples.  Heap those suckers high, apples pack down a lot during the baking process.  You want at least an inch of apples above the rim in the center.  Whisk together your sugar, spices, salt, and flour.  Pour it over the apples.  Dot the apples with the thin slices of butter.

Cover with the top crust.  Crimp your edges well, and make sure to cut adequate steam vents*.  When in doubt, poke another hole in it.  Sprinkle the top with your cinnamon sugar.

Bake this pie for 10 minutes at 450, then drop the heat to 375 and bake until it’s bubbling and the apples are soft, about 50 more minutes.

You absolutely must put a pan beneath it to catch any drips.  I’ve been setting ovens on fire for 20 years with this pie.  It is dangerous, dangerous pie.

* I use small cookie cutters regularly when I make a double crust pie.  I pick an appropriate cutter to cut out sections of pie crust after it’s been rolled.  I place the top crust and put the cut pieces back in their holes, leaving an big cut outline.  At Christmas I cut one star in the center, then cut additional straight steam vents as rays.